Ng will read from 'Everything I Never Told You' Thursday at Joseph-Beth

"Lydia is dead. But they don’t know this yet.” These are the opening
lines to Celeste Ng’s debut novel, Everything I Never Told You. They are not necessarily shocking or revelatory to readers, but instead
reveal a central concern that haunts the entire story: the unknown. The novel
traffics in secrets — those between mothers and daughters, fathers and sons and
brothers and sisters that ultimately threaten to erase a family portrait hung crookedly
in the eyes of everyone else in society.

Set primarily in Midwestern Ohio during
the late 1970s, Everything I Never Told Youdeftly examines a mixed-race family before and after a young girl is
found drowned in a lake. Ng’s prose, graceful yet powerful, follows the
characters as they try to make sense out of a family member’s death and their
own grief. Within this narrative is a deeper one, a quietly devastating
interrogation of identity and the need to belong.

Ng, who will give a reading at Joseph-Beth Booksellers on Thursday at 7
p.m., spoke with me about diversity in diversity, the challenges of writing her
first novel and the metaphors to be found in hidden garbage.

This post is the first in an ongoing series of interviews with local and visiting authors.

CityBeat: How did the idea for Everything
I Never Told Youunfold?
Did it turn out to be the same story you thought it would be when you first
started writing it?

Celeste Ng: I didn’t expect culture to be such a
big part of it. It wasn’t until I started to look at the family. I had an idea
about a family tragedy that would happen, and when I started to write about the
family I knew that they were a mixed-race family. That was sort of surprising
to me.

CB: One thing
I enjoyed about the novel was how you took a mystery framework to explore more
literary themes of identity and race. Can you talk about that choice of
exploring your topics with that aspect of crime/thriller genre?

CN: I never intended to write a mystery
or a thriller. What I’ve always been interested in with my fiction is family
relationships, and how families react to each other. How parents and children
get each other, don’t get each other, drive each other crazy. It’s that idea
that introduced that mystery element into it — I wanted to look at how a family
might deal with a tragedy.

CB: What kind
of research did you do for the novel?

CN: In terms of getting the details
right, I grew up in the early ’80s so a lot of things came from memory — the
telephone cords and the record player that skips a little, all that sort of
stuff. I researched the history of interracial marriage and about how it’s
become more common. That’s when I learned that it wasn’t legal in the United
States until 1967, which was a real surprise to me. For the characters
themselves, I did the kind of research that writers do, which is just digging
deeper and deeper into the characters, writing them until I felt like I knew
what they would do or say.

CB:Another
thing I noticed throughout the book was how adept you were at weaving between
past and present tenses. You begin the novel at the middle, with Lydia’s death,
and that’s what everything else in the story orbits. Was this challenging?

CN: I’m glad you mentioned that, because
it was actually the main thing that I struggled with in writing the novel. I
wrote four drafts of the novel, but the story basically stayed the same
throughout — what really changed was the structure. The past imbues the present
and the present echoes the past, and so I knew that there was a lot in the
family’s background that I wanted to explore, and that was part of the story
just as much as the story of what happened after Lydia’s death. And so I had to
figure out a way to fuse this together so that the reader could see the
connections between present and past. It took a lot of experimenting and
restructuring and revising.

CB: Why did
you set the story in the past, in ’70s Midwestern Ohio? How would the story be
different today, with technology and more access to books like yours?

CN: As I was getting to know the family
and the issues they were facing, I found the ’70s was a period that
encapsulated that. It was a period where women would see their daughters
getting opportunities that they themselves had missed out on. I don’t know if
this a story that couldn’t happen today. I would like to think so — I think we’ve
made a lot of progress — but another thing I researched was how public
attitudes toward interracial marriage had been changing, and it was only very
recently — I think in 1997 that a majority of people felt OK with interracial
marriage, which is kind of mind-blowing to me, because I remember 1997, you
know. I would like to think that things would be a lot different for the family
now, but a lot of the issues about viewing cultures and balancing personal life
and dreams with children — these are still issues that are with us.

CB: Is your
recent success validating to you as a writer, and do you think it might change
the way you write? Do you feel the need to keep or appeal to a wider audience
now that you’ve reached this level of recognition?

CN: That’s a great question. The answer
to how it feels to get all of this is probably surreal — that’s the best
adjective I can come up with. I work alone, in my house or in the corner in the
library and I write these things from my head, not knowing if anyone else will
believe them or will ever connect with them, and so to have the book go out
into the world and have a lot of people connect with it has been really amazing
and kind of mind-blowing. I say to my husband, ‘Is it possible that I am having
a very, very vivid waking dream, and I’m just hallucinating this?’ and he very
nicely says, ‘It’s possible, but seems unlikely that that’s happening.’ I’m
just kind of touched and thrilled, and that sounds very boring and cliché but
it’s true. If it’s changing my writing, I don’t know yet. I’ve started to work
on another novel but it’s on pause at the moment while I’m on book tour. But I’m
thinking about it a lot, and I have to see if it changes my writing style. I
like to think that it won’t, but that just having written a book will have
taught me something.

CB: In 2010,
before publishing your novel, you wrote an essay published in Huffington Post
titled “Why I Don’t Want to be the Next Amy Tan.” After publishing the book,
have people seen you as the next Amy Tan, or have things changed?

CN: You know what, no one has made that
comparison, and I don’t know if that’s because they went and Googled me and
they found that and decided not to do it or not. Amy Tan and I are both
Chinese-American women writers and we write about families, but we write very
different kinds of books. We have different subjects, even if broadly speaking
we are writing about the same thing — families. When you get into particulars,
we’re very different authors, and so I would rather be compared to Tan in terms
of language style and technique, but I don’t think our books are a lot alike.
We’ve had different experiences. I’ve been very encouraged in the past few
years to see that people have been moving away from that kind of comparison — that
there is Amy Tan and then she will be replaced by the next Amy Tan. That there
can be diversity within diversity, that there can be lots of Asian American
voices, and they can all be somewhat different from each other. That it
something that is more possible now that wasn’t even an issue up for discussion
a few years ago.

CB: Who are
your general influences in storytelling, literary or not?

CN: There are some readers I love to
read as a writer to study, but I also read because I love their work. Toni
Morrison is one of them — I think she does an amazing job at writing about
really big important subjects and always keeping it on a human level and making
the writing beautiful. There’s a book called The God of Small Things by
an Indian writer named Arundhati Roy, which again I love as a reader and teach
from it. I pick it up to find passages I want to give to my students and I just
end up reading it at the bookshelf because I love it so much. She handles
language in such an amazing way and she moves through time in away that was an
inspiration for the book. I looked at that a lot as a touchstone to figure out —
how do I weave together past and present? I watch a lot of TV, so I like seeing
some of the long form TV shows that have developed over a long season. I’m a
huge Downtown Abbey fan — it’s so soapy, but it’s on PBS and so you feel
very virtuous when you’re watching it. There’s something about watching
characters develop in that long arc in shows like Mad Men or Sopranos.
Writers tend to sort of downplay TV as an insulin, but I feel that film and
TV do influence the way I tell a story in the way you cut back and forth
between characters or in the way that you show things. So that’s an influence
for sure.

CB: You
mentioned a book you were working on earlier, can you talk more about that
project?

CN: I think it’s going to be another
family story, set in my hometown of Shaker Heights, a suburb of Cleveland. It’s
very pretty, there are lots of trees and beautiful houses, and they like it
that way. What comes along with all that beauty and trying to be progressive
and consciously working to be diverse is that there’s also a lot of focus on
appearance and worry about what other people will think. They have these tiny
little golf-cart sized garbage trucks that drive down every driveway to pick up
the garbage in the back and bring it up to the truck in the front. There’s
never garbage in the front, and I feel like that’s really metaphorically rich,
that you have to keep your garbage hidden. So I think it’s going to involve a
family that’s living in this community and then a mother and daughter come in
from outside and have secrets, and about the way those two families get kind of
intertwined and tangled.

CB: That whole
environment sort of reminds me of Twin Peaks, going back to that TV influence.

CN: Exactly — there are other things
too, like you were only allowed to paint your house certain colors so that the
entire street could be harmonious aesthetically. They don’t do that anymore,
but there’s still a lot of things like that there.

CB: Is there a
question you wish someone would ask you about your work that hasn’t been asked
yet?

CN: One question I was asked in an
interview and then I was sad that they cut it was after being asked if there
would be a movie of my book, who would I want to be in it? I can tell you the
news that was just made official about a week and a half ago — the film rights
have sold to Relativity Media, a studio in L.A. So I’ve been thinking about
this question a lot. One of the things that excites me a lot about the fact
that the book might become a movie — besides the fact that that’s cool — there
would be roles for Asian Americans and mixed Asian actors, and I feel that
right now those people are on the sidelines as extras, or maybe the sidekick.
And so it would be really cool for someone like John Cho to play James the
father. That’s what I’m excited about — the idea that maybe this could be a
place where Asian American or mixed Asian actors could get roles, that there
would be a spotlight for them.

CB: The whole
prospect must be terrifying and wonderful, having your film in someone else’s
hands.

CN: It is, but I’m trying to think of it
as its own thing. I love film adaptations, and what I love about them the most
is when they take the opportunity to make a slightly different thing. It’s like
when you cover a song: it’s better when they don’t try to sound exactly like
the original. When they do something completely different with it, that’s when
I think it’s cool, and so I think of the movie as its own thing. It’s
nerve-wracking, but it’s worth it.

Early last year we wrote about Nick Spencer's successful, somewhat surprising transition into the world of graphic novels. Now Spencer — the former Cincinnati City Council candidate, club operator and music promoter who moved to New York City in 2008 and whose grand ambitions sometimes got him into trouble — is garnering even more attention within the world of his new endeavor, recently nabbing four nominations at the Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards 2011: Best Short Story, Best Continuing Series, Best New Series and Best Writer.

Donald Ray Pollock's debut short-story collection, 2008's Knockemstiff, was something of an unexpected sensation —unexpected in that Pollock was a first-time author at age 53; a sensation in that the stories were driven by a visceral, sharp-edged prose style and a narrative thrust as sensitive as it was savage.

Knockemstiffwas rightly praised by everyone from The New York Times to Chuck Palahniuk (“more engaging than any new fiction in years”) to literary savant Michael Silverblatt, whose incisive KCRW radio show Bookwormfeatured an interview with the author.

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Just a reminder for the discerning literary types out there: Ace wordsmith and impressively bearded Nicholson Baker stops by the Mercantile Library tomorrow (May 3) at 7 p.m. to read from and discuss his work.

The 54-year-old New York City native has tackled a number of topics and genres — from nonfiction to fiction, from books about phone sex and bottle feeding babies to historical investigations about about the insidious nature of war — in a writing career marked by his playful use of language, biting humor and interest in the “moments between the big moments.”

It’s no coincidence that the late David Foster Wallace’s new novel, The Pale King, was published on April 15. Actually, “new novel” might not be the best wording — the 560-page book, which carries the telling subtitleAn Unfinished Novel, was crafted from Wallace’s papers after he committed suicide in 2008.

I’ve yet to read The Pale King, but after perusing several reviews in recent days (including Tom McCarthy’s incisive piece in yesterday’sNew York Times Book Review), I have a pretty good handle on its setting: the seemingly banal inner workings of the Internal Revenue Service.

I like books, magazines and movies. I, as you might have guessed by now, like newspapers, too. It should then come as no surprise that the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County is one of my favorite places on planet Earth and that it continues to offer a smorgasbord of information, almost all of it available for the bargain basement price of $0 across its 40 branches.

The New Yorker magazine recently published its Summer Fiction issue. It includes a list of what its editors deem as the 20 novelists under the age of 40 worth watching, an endeavor destined to be as contentious as it no doubt was excruciating to craft. (There's a reason the magazine hasn't published such a list in more than a decade.)